The spitting image
By 
Here’s CNN’s lede about Donald Trump telling his Secretary of Defense to wage war on American cities as a form of military training:
President Donald Trump appeared to suggest in his remarks today that the Department of Defense should use “dangerous cities as training grounds” for the military and National Guard.
“I told Pete [Hegseth], we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon, that’s a big city with an incompetent governor,” the president said during his remarks to a gathering of top generals and admirals in Quantico, Virginia.
The president then proceeded to tell a story about watching media coverage of troops being spit on, saying in part the new policy should be “they spit, we hit.”
I mean what can you even say about journalistic practices that apparently require characterizing a direct quote saying “do X” as “appeared to say suggest ‘do X?'”
As for the spitting business this is pure Stairway to Freebird from Greatest 1970s Right Wing Myths. Sociologist Jerry Lembcke wrote a whole book about how it was impossible to come up with a single documented case of a Vietnam war veteran having been spat on by anti-war protestors. As in, not one, in a country of (at the time) 250 million people.
As many people have noted or at least should have if they haven’t, Trump is stuck in the fantasy world of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, except like so many other morons in this imbecilic country, he thinks Travis Bickle is the hero of the story:
Relatedly, Trump then told the generals that if military or police vehicles are hit with bricks or other objects, that officers should “do whatever the hell” they want.
“You get out of that car, and you can do whatever the hell you want to do, because those people are, you now can die from that,” he said.
The president of the United States is “suggesting” that the military commit violence against American citizens in American cities, and the collective reaction of the media is pretty much a whaddaya gonna do shrug.
The only good thing about today’s clown show at Quantico is that the military’s top officer class was subjected to a couple of hours of un-curated insanity from Hegseth and Trump, as opposed to being fed whatever tarted up snippets Rupert Murdoch’s minions deign to air on the Fascist News Network.
Hopefully it made a helpful impression.
The Republican governor, Jeff Landry, asked for the Trump administration to support an extended deployment of 1,000 troops in a letter sent to the Pentagon’s top official Pete Hegseth. It comes weeks after Trump suggested New Orleans could be one of his next targets for deploying the national guard to fight crime.
Preliminary data from the New Orleans police department shows that there had been 75 homicides so far in 2025 – including 14 who were killed on New Year’s Day when a terrorist aimed a truck attack on Bourbon Street. There were 124 homicides in 2024. In 2023, there were 193.
New Orleans-based crime trends analyst Jeff Asher, the co-founder of AH Datalyst, wrote on the Bluesky social media platform that the city has had its fewest murders since 1970. “Carjackings are down 80% relative to 2022, vehicle burglaries are down 70%, shootings are down 63%,” Asher also wrote, adding in part: “This is a wholly unnecessary stunt.”
Washington and Memphis similarly had reported steep crime reductions when Trump nonetheless sent troops into those cities in the name of crimefighting.